I would like to thank ReBirth and ra4king for their immense work, this year was probably the most difficult year for judges because of the quantity of the games. I felt it myself, this was hard, not only because of how much time it took, because there were also so many great games. Rarely have there been so many top contenders, usually one or two, but this year there were at least a dozen.

Interesting, the judging panel and community agreed on 7 games in the top 10 (not in the same order though).

In my opinion..."Farmer John and the Birds 4k" didn't get to top 10 in the community, but was in 3rd spot for judges. Good thing, because I thought it was worthy."Wizzy 4k" was worthy of at least 4th spot, while it was 7th in community."ApoBeam 4k" was a cool submission, and I think the community was right to pick it into the top 10, while the judges messed up here."FlyWrench4k" was IMO definitely one of the strongest contender, and I'm glad it was #1 this year. Such a clean, challenging and addicting game."Inf4ktion" was unappreciated by the community, but the judges took note."Parasite Escape" probably deserved a spot on the top 10.

Thank you to all the judges for the effort you put into this. I think I speak for most people here when saying that reading these reviews really means something to the developers. Having done judging once (for the 2007 compo), I appreciate all the work you've put into writing these and playing the games. Again, many thanks!

Great results, thanks for everyone. Special thanks to the judges. Really liked the reviews! Although we beat the number of games this year we did not reach 2012 number of game developers that submitted games. This year we were 34 game developers while in 2012 we had 42.

I really like the games created by zeroone, and what is really great is that he always publish its source code so we can try to learn from it. Although the code is optimized for 4k games but he definitely has a style.

When I get chance, I'll write up a blog about the algorithms that I used throughout the years. I'm always impressed with what people come up with and what can be learned from them. For instance, the technique behind Alan Waddington's Die Z and Gef's Sorcerer4K appear similar and it's something that I never explored.

Thanks for your jobs, judges ! And specially for consistents reviews.They will help for next year ! When I made my game, I found it great , I thought everybody will understand how it works, and so on... Not at all !!!It's very interesting ! Thanks again and congrats to everybody !

A massive thank you to the judges for their hard work in playing and reviewing our games! Your efforts are greatly appreciated, and your feedback is invaluable. You picked an excellent winner this year (it was my favourite also).

An even bigger thank you to Appel for organising and running the contest!

I would like to propose that we increase the size limit for next year's contest, so we can fit in all the missing/cut features. How about 4.1k? It has a nice ring to it

At first I want to say big thanks for the hard work to all judges.I think Flywrench4k is a good choice. Great, hard and funny game. Congratz to Morre!

I am a little bit disappointed with the results of (some) my games but ok. Next year I will try it again ...

A special award for you my friend Most created 4k games in history! That's an awesome feat by itself, and I think everyone really took note of this.

And your games weren't about quantity, I found most of them very excellent and of high quality. It's clear you've mastered the art of creating 4k games. I am curious, how much work was involved in doing this, for each game?

But as you said, I think it's reasonable to be a bit disappointed with how they fared in the scoring, especially perhaps for the community vote, and judging maybe as well. My theory is that the high number of the games worked against you, especially in the community voting, people weren't too keen on playing 25 games from one guy.

For me, I had to try to be careful when reviewing your games, because there was a tendency to rank them relative to your other games, and also demand more of them. So for every one of your game I had to ask myself, "How would I review and rate this if it was from someone who submitted only 1 game?".

But anyway, ApoBeam and ApoBrain were my favorite submissions from you, at least one of them deserved to be in top 10. ApoMonoMirror was also quite good and interesting. ApoStress and ApoTreePuzzle were also quite good. I'm sure they would have fared much better if you would have only submitted them and none of the others. Just being honest.

I think in future contests having a maximum entries limit would be beneficial for everybody involved, something like 5 games from one individual.

Well each judge scored differently, I didn't get any of the other's opinions on what score to give. I just had different categories and awarded points based on technical achievements, graphics quality, and gameplay quality. Sound gave you bonus points but did not hurt you.

It's up to individual judges how they determine their score. The scores from the judges are normalized before they are averaged together.

For me, first I like to classify the game, as being either superb, good, fair, mediocre, poor, etc. I simply do this in my mind, and once I've decided that some game is superb, I can quickly say it deserves at least 90%, and then I compare it to other games that have 90% score and decide that it is better than this but not better than that, and come down to a score of maybe 93%. There are many factors I consider, as ra4king mentioned, graphics, ease of play, difficulty, technical factor, audio, gameplay of course, etc. However relying solely on these factors to judge a game is not good science either, because the game could have audio, nice graphics, technically impressive, but suck in fun and gameplay. So there are aesthetics and subjective factors as well.

But it isn't accurate science. It is easier to do this for the top games, because they are fewer and easier to compare. But the lower you go in the rating, like 70-80%, it becomes much more difficult, because there are more games that fall into that bracket and comparing them is more difficult.

There are always ways to improve the judging process, but year after year the results seem to be alright. I did suggest in another thread to use buckets like "Superb", "Great", "Good", "Fair", "Mediocre" and "Poor", decide on what games fall into what bucket, and then order the games. The judges would have to coordinate together and agree, and that is the biggest practical issue with it really.

@apo:To be honest, because all of them are puzzle games. Puzzle is fun to play but each of them has different environment and rules, requires time to learn if haven't been familiar at first. Action or fast games like Fuego or Rainbow Road are easier to understand. That's not bad, I enjoy puzzle game (I created puzzle game and all of my installed android games are puzzle except Nun Attack), but when they come in group of more than 10 my mind blown a bit

The lowest ApoNurikabe is too confusing. I even googled to know how to play but no success. I asked other like ra4king and he threw me a chair with foaming mouth

About scoring, in my formula no bug/crash gives you 30% start. I know how it feels to fit everything to 4K so either gameplay and graphics has same chance to boost it into 99%.

On a separate note, for the past few years I've calculated the correlations between the judges and the community; interestingly, although this year the correlation between the judges is the lowest since I started doing this, the (Spearman's) correlation between the overall judges score and the community score is almost the same as last year, at 0.725.

Oh wow! Congratulations to Flywrench, my personal favorite, getting 1st on the judging list. It was well deserved.

Apo, it was amazing you were able to create so many high quality games in one sitting. Puzzle games is one of the most hardest genres to accomplish, and you managed to create over 10 unique puzzle games with decent difficulty, quality, and challenge in each puzzle. To be honest, that is a very great achievement in itself and you should be very proud, because your record will probably remain unbroken for a very long time.

Oh, and I would suggest not getting rid of the limit on games. It might help the quality, but it'll will drastically reduce the number of games that will be able to be submitted. Since real-life can be a drag (and unpredictable), quantity is a good thing to strive for. People love numbers more than anything else. If they see that Java4K was able to crank out more than 1000 unique gaming entries; it might be a very good resource to showing people that Java gaming is a force to be reckoned with.

The contest was a great learning experience for me, and I am quite impressed that my entry which I only put 3 weeks of effort on, actually did decent for a first try. This game was actually a demake of a game I did before in The Games Factory for the VCade. My friend did not want to download Vitalize! for some stupid reason, so I remade the game in Java so he could see it for himself. It is just a coincidence it managed to fit in Java4K, so I tinkered with it and tried to make it as small as I could .

Congratulations to everyone who has produced games for this competition. See you guys in the next competition for 2014.

What were you thinking?! 2 judges put Rainbow Road in first place, the community put it in first place, and you put it in 20th place!

In fact, take a look at ApoBlockLock4k, an implementation of Rush Hour, Nob Yoshigahara's sliding block puzzle from the 1970's. Rush Hour puts the player in the role of a parking lot attendant that needs to figure out a way to get a car out of a congested lot. You put ApoBlockLock4K 5 places above Rainbow Road. Meaning, you'd rather re-park cars than race them?! From a game play and a technological achievement point of view, I can't imagine how you came up with this ordering.

In your review of Rainbow Road, you wrote, "Oh my... this must be what it feels like driving on a rainbow. I was expecting a relaxed driving experience, but I got a thrilling and... a competitive race. One of the more interesting racing car 4k game made."

You never played the N64 game that this 4K game was based on? You never played any version of Mario Kart? Why are you even a judge?

What were you thinking?! 2 judges put Rainbow Road in first place, the community put it in first place, and you put it in 20th place!

Not everyone is a Nintendo fanboy. There are enough of them that Nintendo remakes get a nostalgia bonus, but it's a good thing that the judges have different backgrounds: if they were all clones then there wouldn't be any point having more than one. And it's a good thing that the competitors have different backgrounds, because there were some great games on different platforms that get a second breath of life from someone who used to play them.

Appel commented that when he was judging Apo's games he made a conscious effort to judge each game on its own merits rather than against Apo's other games. Similarly, judges should make a conscious effort to judge games on their own merits rather than on the merits of the games which influenced them.

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